Within hours of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Sept. 11, President Bush and other U.S. and western leaders were explaining that though we found ourselves in a state of war, that war was not with Islam.

Nine months later, we're still confused about who our enemy is.

If you have any chance of winning a war, you must be able to identify the enemy.

Are we at war with Islam? Most definitely not.

But, Islam is at war with us.

In fact, Islam has been at war with the West, with Christianity, with Judaism – indeed, with the entire non-Muslim world – ever since the days of Muhammad. This struggle, more than any other, has defined history for the last 1,200 years.

Americans don't understand this because they don't know their history. In Muhammad's era, Islam swept through the Arabian peninsula to conquer the Middle East. Its armies then marched on Europe, Asia and Africa. In the late 15th century, Columbus was exploring new trade routes because Islam's armies controlled the land routes to the East. He accidentally discovered America. In the late 17th century, Islam's armies were at the gates of Vienna.

For the next 300 years, Islam's imperialist ambitions faded. But it is quite clearly on the rebound today.

Enriched by oil wealth, Islam is expanding in every direction – through Africa, through Asia, through Europe – and even in the United States where it is said to be the fastest-growing religion.

Can Islam defeat the West?

Certainly not in any conventional military confrontation. But that is not the goal. This is asymmetrical warfare. The beauty of this conflict from Islam's point of view is that the West can't even identify targets, can't even clearly identify the enemy.

America has troops in well over 100 nations. They are stationed all over the world to provide peace and security. Yet, in truth, America can't adequately provide security "1,000 yards from the U.S. Capitol after nightfall," as Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation write in a new paper, "Why Islam Is a Threat to America and the West."

We are vulnerable to continued terror attacks. But these attacks are not designed to defeat us militarily. They are designed to break our will. They are designed to sow seeds of confusion in a culture that has already lost its own religious underpinnings and moral framework. They are designed, in Marxist theory, to "heighten the contradictions of capitalism" – or, as another generation of communists explained it, to "bring the war home." That was how we lost a war to little Vietnam.

The West has little chance of prevailing in this contest without understanding who the real enemy is.

Am I saying all Muslims are the enemy? Of course not. Were the people living in communist countries during the Cold War our enemies? Not really. The evil regimes that victimized their own people as well as their neighbors were the enemies. The same is true in Islam today.

We must understand in the West today – whether we live in the U.S., Israel, the United Kingdom or elsewhere – that Islam reflects a vastly different worldview from the one that established western civilization. If we try to understand Islam as some sort of extension of monotheistic Judeo-Christian philosophy, we will fail to see the truth.

The truth is that western civilization faces perhaps its greatest test at the hands of Islam today. We don't understand these people – and, not understanding them, we try to give them what we think they want, what we might want in a similar situation. This is how Israel has been led down the primrose path in its negotiations with the Arabs.

It's a war. And, for Islam, the negotiating table is just another theater in that war.

Every day, around the world, if we look for them, we see disparate, seemingly unconnected reports of attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims. We see them in Israel. We see them in India. We see them in Indonesia. We see them in the Philippines. We see them in Sudan. We see them even in the U.S. and Europe.

People are dying – lots of them. In fact, more Christians are being persecuted today than ever before in the history of the world – even under the Romans. Most of those attacks come from Islam.

What we need to understand is that these attacks are connected. They are coordinated. Islam is on the march, again. The only question is whether we see it, acknowledge the reality of it and figure out an adequate response before it's too late.

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. His latest book is "Taking America Back." He also edits the weekly online intelligence newsletter Joseph Farah's G2Bulletin, in which he utilizes his sources developed over 30 years in the news business.

From the beginning, the Prophet Muhammed was persecuted, he never wanted to fight. Especially in the early wars he was involved in, the odds were rediculous - like 10,000 muslims v. 100,000 arab troops. They took his wealth, expelled him from his home, and then sent armies to erradicate him.

The teachings of Islam are to fight only when you have to defend your homes, family, or religion.

Go back to the crusades, when the muslims would take a region over, all other religions were allowed to keep thier religion, when the christians took over a region, it was 'convert or die' there was massive bloodshed. Historically, even Jews living under the Islamic caliphate admitted that they were sheltered and protected from persecution.

Dont be fooled, religions are just fronts these days... The underlying reason for all the bloodshed is politics, wealth, and worldly possesions. Everything that true Islam is against.

Should I launch an attack at Christianity and it's murder? How would my doing this help.... It will not help because Christianity is a Religion just like any other.... Read this artice by a Christian about the pope and what happened to the Natives of the Americas at the hands of Christians:

When Does Genocide Purify?
By ADAM JONES

Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Brazil seems to have done little to shore up the Catholic Church's declining power in its Latin American heartland. It went a long way, however, towards confirming Benedict's reputation as a reactionary bigot.

Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.

This time around, Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."

So there we have it. The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.

Actually, genocide came with it, as Raphael Lemkin knew. Lemkin is the Polish-Jewish jurist who, having fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for refuge in the U.S., coined the word "genocide" in 1943. He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism".)

Benedict's astounding comments attracted barely a flicker of media attention in the West -- almost all of it on the wire services, and some of it problematic in itself. A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide." The reality exists independently of the belief. As blogger Stentor Danielson points out: "In the real world, it's a basic historical fact that the Indians were enslaved. It's a basic historical fact that entire tribes were wiped out. The reason [that] 'many Indian groups believe' these historical facts is because people like Reuters' craven reporters won't admit when there's a fact behind the claims."

Indian organizations and spokespeople expressed outrage at Benedict's statements, calling them "arrogant and disrespectful." Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in Brazil's impoverished northeast, declared: "We repudiate the Pope's comments. To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening" (Reuters, May 14).

Frightening indeed. Genocide scholar Greg Stanton describes denial as the final stage of genocide: "The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses" (see Stanton's "Eight Stages of Genocide" on the Genocide Watch website). Genocidal perpetrators, and those who inherit their mantle, also seek to "purify" historical memory -- as Turkish authorities unceasingly, but so far unsuccessfully, have sought to do in the case of the Armenian genocide.

Stanton also reminds us that denial is "among the surest indicators [that] further genocidal massacres" may lie ahead. That's a thought worth pondering, as the reinvigorated indigenous movement in Latin America confronts a renewed neo-colonial assault on its culture, health, and means of subsistence.

Adam Jones, Ph.D., is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 2006) and editor of Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004).

we should be at war with islam their religion commands them to kill anyone who is not muslim if they do not convert.

Is this guy serious?

Do you know how many muslims peacefully live in America (and the rest of the world)? haha watch out next time you go outside, we are out to get you

and by the way - Dont go quoting a few select lines from the Quran that you probably heard on some biased news channel, neither you, nor they, nor any foolish terroist have the knowledge required to understand such a wonderful book.